Debian on the IBM Thinkpad X40
Chapter 2 - Installation

2.1 Partitioning

First I thought of keeping a copy of Windows but as it requires more than 6 GB, which is more than I'm willing to waste, I removed it entierly. As a sideffect the recovery partition no more works once grub is installed so I removed it as well.

For safety I chose a small partition for / if 180 MB, 2x 512 MB for swap (one is used for crypto-swap, one solely for suspend-to-disk), one after / and one at the end of the disk and used the rest as LVM PV.

I currently use LVMs for /usr (2 GB), /var (1 GB), /var/log (100 MB), /var/cache (1 GB), /tmp (500 MB), /var/tmp (150 MB) and /home (12 GB), all with ext3 filesystems. As ext3 will become xfs-style growfs in the 2.6 kernel series soon allocating additional space to LVMs will be even more comfortable.

2.2 Installing Linux

I installed Debian GNU/Linux using debian-installer netboot-images. Just follow the instructions provided in the installation manual, works flawless including LVM setup.

Debian on the IBM Thinkpad X40